Khadi Couture: Where Have All the Silver Wallahs Gone?

When I was packing to move to India, I folded into my jewelry case a few pairs of earrings that had been worn so many times that the hinges had broken off, and two pairs of bangles inherited (alright, stolen) from my mother, whose hands are about half the size of mine.

I thought: ‘It’ll be simple to get our silver-wallah in Kolkata and have him resize them, right?’

Wrong.

The silver-wallah in New Market where my family has been going for years flatly refused to touch the bangles.

Again and again across shops in both Kolkata and Delhi I got similar responses.

“This work would be impossible even for the original bangle maker.”

And, most hurtful of all, “Why do you want to wear this kind of antique? These designs are no longer in fashion.”

Until recent years, upper class Indian women would only wear gold. In some families, this is true even today, and the amount of the precious metal given to a woman on her wedding day is as much a symbol of her status as the car her new husband drives.

Silver is generally worn by tribal women. In silver-rich states such as Rajasthan and Orissa, they would (and still do) literally wear their life’s savings in necklaces made up of many bits of silver bought as and when they can afford.

But in the last 30 years or so, chunky, tribal silver jewelry has come very much into vogue, even in circles that used to think of silver as the inferior metal.

Heavy, smooth silver pendants from Jaipur and Jaisalmer as well as careful, delicate filigree work mirroring Bhubaneshwar’s Konark Temple now fill marketplaces and jewelry shops.

Where, then, have all the silver kaarigars (silversmiths) gone?

A friend finally told me of a line of silver shops in Paharganj market. “We’ll just have to knock on the door of every silver-wallah there until one of them says yes,” she said.

She was right. But not for the reason we thought: We did find what we were looking for in Paharganj, but not at one of the silver shops.

While wandering around the market and asking everyone where the silver shops were, one man replied, “I don’t know about the shops, but have you tried the kaarigar that sits upstairs?”

My friend and I looked at him wide-eyed, and then followed him down the narrow allies of Paharganj to a decrepit set of steps.

We climbed up in the darkness and found him.

His name is Sujit Mondol and he sits cross-legged at a floor-level desk in a room the size of a matchbox next to a man at a desk a little lower.

On their work tables sat five or six simple metal tools. From the ceiling a tube light hung precariously and on the wall there was an image of a deity in a cracked frame.

When we entered, Mr. Mondol and his friend, Tunnu Mallick, looked at us in shock.

After some niceties, I explained the nature of my problem in halting Hindi. Mr. Mondol spoke to his colleague in Bengali: “Let’s take a look at what she’s got.”

“Oh, are you Bengali?” I asked hopefully in Bangla.

One of the many barriers between us vanished as we started to converse easily.

“Here,” I showed him the bangle. “Is there any hope?”

“What, this?” he asked incredulously. “They told you they couldn’t do this?”

He handed the bangle to Mr. Mallick below him. Mr. Mallick took a tiny little saw and deftly cut a break in my bangle. It took less than 30 seconds. Then he filed down the edges and said: “There you go. Just bend it a little to get it on. It won’t break. Trust me.”

All of a sudden the bangle was on my hand and I was full of questions: “How long have you been here? Why doesn’t anyone else do this work?”

“It’s mostly us Bengalis who do this work now,” he told me. “The kaarigars in Rajasthan, in Orissa, even in Dubai, half of them are Bengalis from near my village,” a tiny place about 15 kilometers from the town of Dankuni in West Bengal.

“But why are they so hard to find?” I asked.

Numbers of silversmiths in India are dwindling, he said. “I was born into this profession, as was my father and my grandfather. But my son, he wants to go to school, get a degree. He doesn’t want to work with his hands.”

“And I don’t want him to, either. Look at this place. Is this any place for a young boy?”

In another ten minutes, Mr. Mallick handed me my pile of silver. I asked him how much I owed him. He looked sheepishly at his friend and said “I suppose you could give me 200 rupees ($3)”

“Please,” I said as I pushed whatever I had in my wallet towards him. “You’ve helped me so much.”

“No, Didi, [older sister]” he told me, shaking his head vigorously. “What will I do with all this money? The neighborhood boys will just steal it from me if they find it. You come back with any other work you have. That’s enough for me.”

Don’t worry, Mr. Mondol. I will.

Piyali Bhattacharya is a freelance writer based out of New Haven, Connecticut and New Delhi, India. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Outlook, TimeOut Delhi and EGO Magazine. She writes a blog called The Sari-torialist and will be contributing a monthly column on South Asian style called Khadi Couture to India Real Time. She is currently working on her first novel.

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